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Friday, September 16, 2016

Review: Robinson Crusoe

Excruciatingly Tedious

1.5 stars

Mini Review:

A kiddie animation flick about how Robinson Crusoe learned to survive on a tropical island is fun in the beginning but gets progressively tedious to watch with so many animal antics crammed in that you stop caring. Besides, the villainous cats could scare very little kids.

Main Review:

It is a great idea to have a bumbling, seasick sailor shipwrecked on a tropical island, where smart animals (a macaw, a pango, a goat, a tapir and others) help him find his feet, literally, and help him survive the pirates and the wild cats…

The animation is cute. The jokes are too. There’s body odor from the practically blind goat, overweight jokes about the tapir, and the macaw has the propensity of getting his tail feathers caught…The jokes just stop being funny after a while and you want to roll your eyes. But you see that the kiddies love the bumbling Crusoe and you continue to watch.

The pirates show up and their viciousness gets a little scary. And then there is the death of Crusoe’s loyal dog, the cats being responsible. It is not very pleasant to see death of a pet dog, or that the filmmakers cast cats as villains.

Considering how far animation has come from being just kiddie cartoons, this kind of animation drags itself down and you want to watch Monsters Inc. or UP or even Despicable Me. We’re not even getting into the realm of beautiful animation films like Kubo And Two Strings (2016) or even Song Of The Sea (2014) for comparison. This one and a half hour film just feels longer and so tiresome, you wish the cats had drowned much faster. The end is abrupt too, but you are so relieved that the credits begin to roll you say a silent prayer wishing they would stop fooling themselves by retelling the classics in such a haphazard way.(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)